A Fascinating Traitor | Page 2

a rank fool to go there," he growled, "and a greater fool to come over here! I might have got on easily to Malta, and then chanced it from there to Calcutta!"
The sun's last lances glittered on the waters gleaming clear as crystal, with their deep blue tint of reflected sky, and liquid sapphire! The gardens were becoming deserted as the loungers dropped off homeward one by one, and still the handsome young fellow sat moodily gazing down into the rushing waters of the arrowy Rhone, as if he fain would cast the dark burden of his dreary thoughts far away from him down into those darkling waters. But thirty-two years of age, Alan Hawke had already outlived all his wild boyish romances. The thrill with which he had first set foot upon the land of Clive and Warren Hastings had faded away long years gone! And, Fate had stranded him at Geneva!
As he sat, still irresolute as to his future movements, the dying sunlight gilded the splendid panorama of the whole Mont Blanc group. Rose and purple, with fading gold and amethystine gleams played softly upon the far-away giant peak, with its noble bodyguard, the Aiguilles du Midi, Grandes Jorasses, the Dent du Geant, the sturdy pyramid of the Mole, and the long far sweep of the Voirons. But he noted not these splendors of the dying sun god, as he stood there moodily defying adverse fate, a modern Manfred. "I might with this get on to London--but what waits me there? Only scorn, callous neglect!" His eye fell upon the statue of Jean Jacques, lifted up there by the sturdy men who have for centuries clung to the golden creeds of civil and religious liberty--the independence of man--and the freedom of the unshackled human soul. "Poor Rousseau! seer and parasite, fugitive adventurer, the sport of the great, the eater of bitter bread--the black bread of dependence! I will not linger here in a long-drawn agony! Here, I will end it forever, and to-night!"
There were certain visions of the past which returned to shake even the iron nerves of Alan Hawke! Face to face now with his half formed resolution of suicide, the wasted past slowly unrolled itself before him.
The brief days of his service in India, an abrupt exit from the service, long years of wandering in Japan and China, as a gentleman adventurer, and all the singular phases of a nomadic life in Burmah, Nepaul, Cashmere, Bhootan, and the Pamirs.
He smiled in derision at the recollection of a briefly flattering fortune which had rebaptized him with a shadowy title of uncertain origin. Thus far, his visiting card, "Major Alan Hawke, Bombay Club" had been an easily vised passport, but--alas--good only among his own kind! He was but a free lance of the polished "Detrimentals," and, under this last adverse stroke of fortune, his poor cockboat was being swamped in the black waters of adversity. He had staked much upon a little campaign at the Foreign Office in London. The cold rebuff which he had received to there had carried him in sheer desperation over to Monaro and incoming onto Geneva, he had "burned his ships" behind him. Ignorant of the precise manner in which his clouded reputation had stopped the way to his advancement in the English Secret Service, he remembered, even at the last, that a few letters were due to those who still watched his little flickering light on its way over the trackless sea of life. For hard-hearted as he was,--benumbed by the blows of fate, his heart calloused with the snapping of cords and ties which once had closely bound him--there were yet loosely knit bonds of the past which tinged with the glow of his dying passions--the unforgotten idols of his adventurous career!
He rose and walked mechanically along the Qua du Mont Blanc with the alert, springy step of the soldier. "Once a Captain, always a Captain" was in every line of his resolute, martial figure. His well-set-up, graceful form, his nobly poised head and easy soldierly bearing contrasted sharply with the lazy shuffle of the prosperous Swiss denizens and the listless lolling of the sporadic foreign tourists. Crisp, curling, tawny hair, a sweeping soldierly moustache, with a resolute chin and gleaming blue eyes accentuated a handsome face burnt to a dark olive by the fiery Indian sun. An easy insouciance tempered the habitual military smartness of the man who had known several different services in the fifteen years of his wasted young manhood. As he swung into the glare of the hospitable doorway of the Grand Rational, the obsequious head porter doffed his gold banded cap.
"Table d'hote serving now, Major!" With the mere social instinct of long years, Alan Hawke recognized the man's perfunctory politeness, tipped him a couple of francs,